Making XLR Cables #1 - Solder a Cable and Tips (Public)

all right i'm dave rat and today i'm going to do the first in a series of videos on soldering xlr cables i'm going to go over my cable types there's a lot of different types of mic cables different diameters different shields serve shields braid shield foil shields conductive plastic shields combinations of those various shields they each have different impacts on the protection from noise or reliability durability flexibility longevity of the cable tools different types of tools various types of cable strippers advantages and disadvantages of using the different types of cable strippers which ones damage the cable which will give you more reliable outcomes soldering irons different types of soldering irons inductive irons butane iron uh just regular soldering iron plugs in the wall ones with controls different heat temperatures cablevise way to hold the cables way too while you're working you know do you put it in a vice screw it down do you alligator clips a bunch of different ways of retaining these extra connectors advantages and disadvantages time wise and cable prep how do you know how far to strip how far do you strip the outer jacket how far do you strip the inner leads failure types different things that can go wrong with cables whether or not they're miss wires or poorly manufactured poorly made different overstripped understrip various cable wire lengths offsets reusing connectors how to clean up connectors really fast and easy or fairly fast and easy to reuse them and anything else i can think of so i get a lot of a lot of ground to cover and by the end of it you should have a pretty in-depth knowledge of um all the stuff i know all right so let's get to it i'm going to make a short mic cable here i've got a couple of nitrate connectors i'll also go over different types of connectors in the other videos and a short length of um you know kind of pretty generic mic cable it's a 22 gauge serve shield mic cable i've got my favorite soldering iron here i'll talk about more in future videos and a bunch of tools to do this with so for this i'm just going to kind of just do it fast and easy how i would just make a utility cable that then i want to just use for whatever um i like these strippers these are i'll go over different types of strippers oh first of all let's open this up and take a look at what's inside this is the female connector and in here we have all the various parts i'll go into depth on that some later date and i'm going to make sure we put the strain relief on because once you solder it on you will need to unsolder it in order to put it on this doesn't matter if it goes on now or later i'll put it on now but um it's it's got a split in it so it can go on um afterwards um shrink wrap and stuff i'll talk about shrink wrap strategies as well in future videos um okay here's a female connector this is a female now uh these some of these are numbered in there they are numbered one two three or g two and three and um i usually have a hard time seeing them and looking takes some time so i actually have a little system that i use to remember that and i'll share that with you and it is fridge motor fridge mower if you remember fridge motor is a female so that's the f of fridge r is the right side and the g is the ground so that means on a female right ground so i can just look at the back of this connector with the cups in the upright position and i know that on the female connector the ground is on the right side so i don't got to look at those numbers my favorite tool pair of needle nose pliers with a rubber band on them so let's go ahead and put that on there first thing we want to do is tin the ends so we'll throw a little bit of solder there we're just going to put just enough to fill the end of the cups you don't want to fill the cups all the way up this little strain relief here this tells you how far you're going to strip it so this piece here on the mail we can see it fits up in there and we can see where it's going to grab the cable so we can strip from the dip of the cup right there up to the beginning of the grips and we'll leave a little bit there so it's about that long on this one and um this stripper here will just go oh pull that off um okay now the copper hairs now to free up all these hairs you're gonna get a bunch of hairs and uh not hairs uh thin wires for the shield on a serve shield the serve shield is one that wraps around in the spiral and to separate them the copper or the wires will bend and stay bent whereas the other hairs will not so if you just kind of bend those out of the way the everything else will stay straight then you can take the center wires and bend them the other way and you're left with the stuff that you're going to want to trim having a pair of scissors for doing this is really handy especially like these are wire stripping cutting scissors with them all right so now we've got our basic starting point i'm going to twist up the serve shield here into a nice bundle i'll make sure i have no extra wires sitting around that are leading in straight when you strip the cable you do not want to cut any wires if you use any stripper this razor blade or edge or sharp and it cut some of those wires start again because nicking those wires you don't want to lose any of them you want to have every single one of those as a strength for later i'm going to take this gripper here i'm going to put it in and pull up now for stripping the center these internals i like them to be just enough to lay into the end of the cup here they don't need to go all the way down you don't need to push them down into the cup they can sit right on the outside so they can just lay right on the top there so this is about twice as long as i need on that and what i'm going to do is i usually carry a little trash can and i will trim all of these wires simultaneously down to the length that i want put this over here so we've got not a lot also when you're str when you're soldering a lot of times with most jackets unless they're teflon most jackets will retract some so you can under strip the end and as you when you tin it which is putting some solder on the end the jacket will retract so it's better to go under than over all right so in order to solder this i'm going to use my favorite tool which is the pliers with a rubber band and we're going to hopefully you can see that in the camera there just a little bit right there now gravity is our friend here so if solder is clinging on to the end of something having it pointing down so the gravity will drop it onto the iron will stop it from balling up now i've got extra stuff in my iron i don't like to use a sponge if uh or i don't use uh my favorite way of keeping an iron clean is to just have a bucket and give it a little tap there and it will clear them all right so there's our ends look all right now we can do is this was the female and female right ground was our adventure there and let's go ahead and we'll do the ground to the right first put that right in there and get a little solder on there now i don't like to take the solder off of the reel because then you end up with a bunch of little scraps and we don't want a bunch of little scraps waist solder and you're always looking for them this way you just always have your solder attached to the thing now as far as the which one goes next we're going to use black to pin three on this cable and white to two and i took it out of the pliers because i don't really need it anymore the ground is holding it in place and we look pretty good there and finally here for the white one grab a little solder and again gravity is my friend so i'm trying to put the solder so it flows down into whatever i'm doing soldering upwards doesn't necessarily do us as well all right so this is it's not um the most perfect you know everything but this is really well into good enough it's a good solid it's easy it's fast you saw i can we can do these really quickly where you've just got solder in the cup another thing that's important is that the wires are relatively the same length here you don't have like really long and short wires and also there's no reason to run the solder all the way up the ground lead these wires are flexible and they they're soldered at the end but we don't want the ground wire rigid up to the end and i'll talk about that more later all right so now let's go ahead and slide this up and we will line this up usually there's a dip here on this type of connector there's a dip that goes lines up with the ground the other ground the fourth connection now xlrs most xlrs not all are four pin connectors or four conductor connectors and the one the fourth conductor is the chassis ground and in future videos i will go over the chassis ground when to use it why to use it why not to use it or why we use it okay so there's our female let's go ahead and do the male side of things and go and grab all these wires all at once bend them down good bend the main wires the other way clear the crap or the little leads and if i wasn't doing this for the video i would have cut those right into that little trash can there so i don't build up a lot of debris on my test bench um and kind of keep things clean and strip those and we had black to three we gotta remember that because we sealed that up [Music] always remember to put your shells on i like to put the shells on after it's tinned because otherwise you can fray the wires when you're putting it on um put the uh not the shell the strain relief backing okay so now we've got our pliers clip that onto there um and we will tin the cups and i'm i'm laying the iron in at an angle here because i get a better contact than just using like the tip in from this angle [Music] i'm kind of laying it in from the side so i just put little dabs in there of solder in the ends maybe you can see that and this is our fridge motor scenario so now we're on to the motor with the male so the male and then t o is pin um two and r is to the right so this is my right pin 2 is the right and we add white to 2. so let's go ahead and do that one first we'll lay that in there hopefully you can see that cool a little messy but nothing's um coming out of where it should be and cool and finally the ground wire and we'll grab a little solid for this cool all right and again nice setup there no fray wires i'm a little long on these leads so now this shrunk back a bit i'd prefer not to have um this extra metal between the insulation and the solder cup so that the stripping was a little long i probably should have trimmed that but since this is covered in solder and it's not long enough to bend over and short together even if i was to really twist this around those two would not be able to touch i'm going to let it go as and it's a short cable and it i'll talk more about different usages and durabilities of cables and why we would terminate them differently um cool let's throw this on here and we're going to line it up with its little key slot there that it fits in all right we got ourselves a nice cable now boom um now we want to test it so one way of testing is to get a meter out put this on the beep and go from pin three to three and we're good and then there to there and here to here now if you really want to test it though it's not just whether it's conductive you want to make sure the pin it only connects two and not the other two and this one only connects to three and not the other two and this only connects and not the other two so we're checking every possibility um another way to check it is and what i prefer is the xlr sniffer sender this is sound tools product designed a while back and you plug it in and it that tells you got power and this tells you a b and c it tells you every possible connection and it checks every possible short every possible open circuit everything that could possibly go wrong with the cable and you can move it around and see if anything is intermittent while doing it and make sure none of the lights flash all right well that takes us for a simple and easy cable solder that will make something that's reliable and useful um i will do some more videos and bump this up a notch awesome so thank you for hanging out and i hope you found this video and others that i do interesting and informative and check out soundtools.com take a look at the products i personally designed some solutions for the pro audio industry analog over cat 5 a bunch of testers and other useful tools ratsound.com has got our sales department rental department install department we sell a wide variety of pro audio and av gear we do installations small to large and we do rentals for everything as small as local clubs and backyard parties all the way up to coachella festival and artists like pearl jam jack johnson blink 182. and thanks for hanging out [Music] uh

Channel: Dave Rat

Views: 20,621

Keywords: Dave Rat, xlr connector soldering, Making XLR Cable, Solder XLR Cables, making an xlr cable, Solder mic cable, Making Mic Cable, Making Mic Cable Tips, xlr wiring configuration, XLR wiring, xlr connector wiring, how to solder, solder mic cable xlr, Strip and tin, strip and tin wire, xlr wiring connection, wiring xlr connectors, how to make a microphone cable

Id: S6prsGkbZi4

Length: 17min 54sec (1074 seconds)

Published: Sun May 30 2021